Robots to enjoy long walks on the beach

IN THE deserts of an alien planet, the famously neurotic C-3PO from Star Wars had a talent that today's robots sadly lack: hiking through sand dunes. That could soon change, though, as humanoids learn how to balance when the going gets soft.

Walking in a desert or on a beach is tough going, because both feet sink into the sand, and slip over the sand particles. This upsets a droid's balancing system, which assumes it will step on a hard surface. It becomes confused when information from its accelerometers shows that its feet are unsteady.

To fix the problem, engineers led by Shunsuke Komizunai of Japan's Tohoku University in Sendai, researched how balancing systems can compensate for sand's unusual characteristics. To do so, they made a model robot foot about the same size as an adult human's - and made it "tread" with various levels of force in a box full of sand to represent robots of different weights. Last month they presented results they had collected from accelerometers and other sensors at the eighth international conference on flow dynamics, also in Sendai.

The team plans to simulate sand walking in humanoid robots and then adjust control software to cope with different types of sand or loose soil.

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